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Keeping His Marbles: Q+A With Gian Enzo Sperone
"Marble Sculpture from 350 B.C. to Last Week" and "Portraits/Self-Portraits from the 16th Century to the 21st Century," currently on view at Sperone Westwater, Gian Enzo Sperone's gallery with Angela Westwater on the Bowery, combine two of the 71-year-old dealer's passions: collecting and history. With 90% of the works coming from Sperone's private collection, the shows spread over four floors-the marble exhibition is on the ground floor and balcony; and the portraits are on the two floors above.
"I do exhibitions like these to explore how good our great artists are in comparison to the Old World Masters," Sperone told A.i.A. "I have expectations for how I think the language of the art world should develop."
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Faux-Finished to the Core: Q+A With Nick Van Woert
Nick Van Woert's cavernous studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is filled with all manner of good, clean fun, including a foosball table and a work surface that converts to a ping pong table. Walking through the studio, the tone becomes serious, littered as it is not just with wooden statues of religious figures but a cage modeled after a solitary confinement cell in a Supermax prison and the personal belongings of Ted Kaczynski, which he bought at an auction and has spread neatly on the floor like finds in an archeological dig. With such objects he explores the transcendentalism of Henry David Thoreau, the anti-industrial guerilla tactics of the Luddites and the homemade bombing techniques of the Monkey Wrench Gang.
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Q + A With David Altmejd
For 37-year-old, New York-based artist David Altmejd, sculptures, like human bodies, generate a certain energy. Altmejd's current show, at the Greenwich, Conn., Brant Foundation-established by Brant Publications chairman Peter Brant-includes work from the past 10 years and announces Altmejd's adoption of a new favored motif: the giant. He's transformed the foundation's sleek galleries into body parts-the chest, the heart, the central nervous system and the head. The show remains on view through April 2012.
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Brazil Trades Summer For Major Artist Debuts
Improbably, "In The Name of the Artists: American Contemporary Art from the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art," a show of 219 works curated by Gunnar Kvaran, the director of the private Norwegian museum, is the first showing of works by Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Matthew Barney, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman in São Paolo [open through Dec. 4]. "Most of the artists in the show have never been shown in Brazil, which was quite a surprising discovery for me," Kvaran told A.i.A. "It has been moving to see the reception. A curator at the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo stood in front of a work by Damien Hirst, and said to me, ‘you know, I've never seen a work by him before.'"
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Pacific Standard Time's West Coast Gems
"Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945–1980," a monumental exhibition opening in part this weekend at the Getty Center, means to remind the world that Los Angeles was an unofficial center of art production in the postwar United States. "Many of the major cultural institutions, such as the Getty, the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) have existed only since the 1980s," Andrew Perchuk, the deputy director of the Getty Research Institute and the curator of "Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950–1970," one of four exhibitions in the program, told A.i.A. "There were great artists making art here, there just wasn't any support for them."
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Born and raised in Reno, Nevada, a city with one museum and one major gallery, Nick Van Woert's mixed-media practice evolved from doodles, dra
